


empath

by motion_sickness



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Reincarnation, Uchiha Massacre, local child is spirited away by demons more at 11, local civilian would like to go home now if it is at all possible, second-person pov sometimes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:08:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21574243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motion_sickness/pseuds/motion_sickness
Summary: em·path/ˈempaTH/nounnoun:empath; plural noun:empaths1. a highly sensitive individual2. [redacted] often to the point of taking on the pain of others at their own expense3. a bleeding heart and dry eyes
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	1. to be wild and perfect for a moment

> Do you love this world?  
> Do you cherish your humble and silky life?  
> Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

You wake up from a dream with the scent of flowers roiling around you. Like a heavy perfumed fog, the smell of things growing and things dying and things blooming before they turn rotten-sweet, sticking to your face like dust or pollen, like something indistinct and blurry but undeniably _there_. You hate the smell and so you tilt your head up, eyes still shut tight and take a fresh breath.

The wind is shoving itself into your lungs hard enough to hurt, like a heavy knife — like the butchers have — pain blunted by its perfect sharpness but still present enough to be felt and yet. Yet somehow gentle, brushing goosebumps into the skin you have exposed to the night air. 

You wake up from a dream of dying, one you dreamt while dead, and find yourself...laughing. Though it hurts, though it pulls at your ribs and the ache beneath them like a long string through the pearl-bright of your bones — a _red_ string, you think — and somehow that sounds right.

The world spins above you, starlight in shards and the moon severed to pieces by the forest trees, proud and thrumming with an old power, something ancient and still alive. Still living even with you like this, in the half-state between dead and something else, wrung out and drained. Cold to the touch.

Hands come up to cradle your face — not yours but your mother's — and you are a child again. Small. Looking up at giants. Your mother smells like flowers, vanilla and ambergris, her hands like claws as she presses her fingers right underneath your eyes and pushes until her nails leave crescents on your skin.

Her sigh is despondent, envy leaks from her voice in a low growl turned into a pantomime of a purr that gathers in her throat and fills your ears like thunder would. That same danger, the threat hidden under the clouds in her eyes and the brightness of her smile.

"My boy," she murmurs. "My beautiful, beautiful boy."

And you know she loves you. You're afraid but she _loves_ you.

"Yes mother," you say to her, soft and quiet. Obedient, willing to listen. Willing to forgive, for all the good it does you.

"My boy," she sighs and in the dream her hair sweeps across her shoulders and frames her face, falling around the both of you like a curtain. The scent of flowers grows nearer, heavier. Your eyes fix themselves on the hollow of her throat where her pulse is a slow stutter.

She's too vulnerable.

You worry.

There is nothing you can do though you think something must be done.

Her hands are tighter around your face now and warmth tracks its way down your cheeks. Her eyes are closed and you watch, soft and quiet and obedient, as flowers bloom on her body. All of them red. 

"I love you," she promises. Petals fall from her lips with each word, slow and careful. 

"I know mother," you say and it makes her smile. Her mouth is a deep ruby and it suits her, for she is a woman who deserves such jewels, deserves to have them glittering at her ears and throat while she stands under the lights and glows like something polished. Something cut and carved into perfection, something that even you may become one day even if she says you're too soft to stand it. 

"I love you."

You know she does. 

You wake up from a dream with flowers in your hands, red pearling in your palms and wrists and you are blooming in the night where no one can see you but yourself. Roses are crushed between your fingers and their thorns have reached out towards the rest of your body somehow, holding you tight, looped around your arms and the openness of your throat.

The petals are luxuriously soft but their scent carries the tang of iron and rust and you are a soft thing, too soft to make anything of yourself. Your mouth shapes words into the night that only you can hear and you answer yourself again and again.

One of you speaks while the other listens and one of you cries while the other comforts and one of you lives while the other cannot die.

 _I love you._

_I'm sorry._

You wake up from a dream to find yourself home again. Right where you should be.

Petals clog your throat but you know they're not there.

You have always hated flowers.

.

.

.

To begin again is a beautiful thing.

A perfect thing.

An opportunity granted by the heavens, a gift from the ruling stars who have seen you suffer, seen you ground into a blade when all you wished for was to become dust. A wish ungranted but you have found that most of them are.

There is no need to fret.

You come awake all at once, every muscle held taut as the world comes into sharp focus, the gray gleam of a pre-dawn sky glimpsed from your open window and closer, the four walls of your room and the emptiness of it.

You melt back into bed and close your eyes. 

_Good morning_ , you think. Polite and perhaps a little bit apologetic. Not that it matters; its the thought that counts. _Counts for what?_

Almost nothing, as do all your thoughts, as is the way of things.

You move from the bed to the floor in one long, sinuous movement and hit the floor with a soundless thump. Something you feel rather than hear. The window is dragged shut, the curtains closed and your room is shrouded in foggy darkness. It does not bother you.

Your heart is calm, beating low and steady as you walk to the mirror, a round and dusty thing that used to fit in one hand. Now you hold it in two and tilt the surface up so you can see the shadow of your face.

How small you are. 

Your face is round, eyes wide and dark. You put the mirror away, tuck it underneath a loose floorboard near your bed lest your mother find it and throw it away. Uchiha Mikoto keeps a clean house and has no patience for mess. You think it will be reasonable to excuse your past obsession with cleanliness as a passed down trait.

Although you no longer worry about such things, having grown used to dirt and dried blood and things even worse; but having an answer ready is always better than having none.

The house is quiet when you creep out of your room, silent and still in the way homes with ninja living in them usually are. Habits are hard things to break. You climb a footstool in the bathroom and wash your face.

The water runs a little longer than it should because you like the sound of it and when you finally twist the faucets shut the sudden silence echoes in your head. You turned off the lights when you came into the bathroom because the brightness of it made your eyes burn so you don't know what kind of expression you're making even with a wide mirror in front of you.

You can't see yourself.

 _It's for the best_ , you think and march back to bed.

The pillows are cold and so is the blanket. 

It doesn't matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uchiha itachi coming to realization that he is now two disasters in a trenchcoat, instead of one lone trashcan fire mess: hm! this is no longer my problem! *goes back to bed*


	2. before they are nothing, forever

Something must be done. 

Fugaku looks at his son and thinks for a moment that he's gone mad. Thinks for a moment that he can see a slight splinter, a crack in the middle of his glossy black eyes, like glass shattering after a hard hit. A slow spread of fault lines like a spider's web.

Beautiful in its terror, an awful thing to find lovely. Fugaku thinks, _this is my fault_. And cannot do anything about it.

.

.

.

Uchiha Itachi is a genuis. A prodigy. It is not very difficult being Itachi. Of course, this is where the problem lies. You are not Itachi.

Itachi is beyond your reach and his smooth, cultured voice echoes in your ears in apology. Every day that passes is another day stolen. You wonder if Itachi has your body now, if he has found the monsters that lie under its skin, if he has grown familiar with their jagged teeth. You wonder if he's alright. You hope he is.

.

.

.

Uchiha Itachi wakes up all at once but his eyes remain shuttered, lashes fanned out, dark crescents against moon-pale skin. His body moves with preternatural grace, with an elegance that has been written viciously into its bones and a majesty that has been pressed into his skin like a mark.

He has become something untouchable, just a blink away from breaking. The sun has barely risen and the sky is just beginning to grow light. Itachi stands in front of his window and watches the sunrise, detached. 

He takes a slow breath, smooth and unhurried and then makes himself stop breathing. Waits for the burning to begin in his lungs. A shiver of darkness stretches in mind, looming. He feels faint, feels himself fading. And then he breathes in. Inhales. Exhales. Opens the window and thinks, _I might as well_.

Nobody knows this but the both of them, one gone and the other half-poised to follow but Itachi blinks up at the sky and thinks of things that bloom and decides in that moment that he might as well live. Might as well.

.

.

.

You have miscalculated. 

You have miscalculated and Uchiha Itachi is dead.

Not really of course.

The Clan Head's son, the pride of the Uchiha would never die so easily. But you watch him from your spot on the swings, swaying back and forth in slow motion, just barely moving.

It's a warm day, early spring and you are surrounded by life, children laughing and shrieking, the scent of wild blooms and the brightness of the sky overhead. You see none of it, hear none of it and feel nothing. You only watch, deathly quiet, swaying in increments. 

He holds his mother's hand while he walks, face turned up like a small flower reaching for the light, like his mother holds the sun in her body and he is watching her glow.

You can see his eyes from where you are. Dark eyes — as it should be — but there is nothing familiar in them, smooth and bright as they are with childish curiosity or as close as someone like him can ever get. A mind that moves like quicksilver but it is still a child's mind, unknowing. Innocent. You can see it. You can tell.

You feel vaguely sick. Itachi is gone but he is still here. He is so small, a butterfly child with the way happiness flutters in him, sweet and warm and intense, solemn in the way he usually is. Like he can hold it in his palms like a treasure to keep.

Like joy is something he can have, something he _believes_ he can have. You can feel it all the way from where you are. No more than a child but he is already being trained so his mouth turns up in only the barest suggestion of a smile. 

But still Itachi is happy. He is small and he is happy and his mother picks him up and settles him on her hips and he holds the front of her shirt in one hand and lays his head against her shoulder. He is still a child and something howls furiously under your skin, _how could they have done this_. How could they have _ruined_ him. You remember him say _a blade when I wanted to be dust_ and think, _there must be something better_.

There must be something you can do for something must be done. 

This Itachi is still alive.

You can't let him die again.

.

.

.

Fugaku looks at his son and thinks, _ah. I must have seen wrong._

( _I_ _f one day a child turns up at his doorstep and he looks down to see those eyes again — if one day a child looks at him and says his name like a curse — Fugaku- **sama** in low murmur like it has poisoned their tongue and they want to spit it out but are too polite to do so — then he will stay quiet. _

_I_ _t_ _could have been his **son**._)


	3. you do not have to be good

Uchiha Yomi grows up in glamour. It doesn't make him vain. He is just very used to finery. From the very moment he is able to assert himself he picks the softest materials for his blankets, the finest of silks for his clothes, the sharpest of knives to lie hidden underneath flowing sleeves.

He asks for piercings when he turns five, jaw set in a way his guardians have learned means stubbornness.

They don't allow it. The next morning Yomi arrives to breakfast with a silver shard of mirror glass dancing merrily in one of his ears. It shimmers in the light and a small rainbow pours into Yomi's bowl when he tilts his head just so. The house is very quiet, because only Yomi lives there. He eats his breakfast and leaves his dishes in the sink.

It's his birthday and he has preparations to make.

Small and elegant, Yomi holds himself with a sense of majesty that surprises his many, many relatives. They coo over the way he tilts his chin, cold and regal, and surveys them all, cataloging.

His eyes miss nothing of the way they are dressed, the care ( or lack thereof ) put into hairstyles and outfits, the posturing, who compliments whose child and who really means it, who wants another dead and who might give it an honest try. It's almost nostalgic.

Having family is just like he remembers it to be.

Bladed words behind sweet smiles, bubbling poison underneath burning pride and the looming threat of a slit throat just to make a point. Yomi is most comfortable in this kind of atmosphere. Only this time he will be allowed to use his own weapons as well and without the fear of being locked away for it.

He takes a deep breath and savors it, allows the heavy fire-snap and acrid smoke of these peoples emotions to settle under his skin in a heated rush. They feel things so _intensely_ , these people.

These are the people that drove Itachi to death, he reminds himself, almost curious in his appraisal. There is an old snippet of memory tangled at the back of his mind, Itachi's quiet murmur and his perfectly enunciated words, easily heard despite the low tones: Uchiha love dearly, love madly. They would stop at nothing to protect their own.

Very good.

Yomi can do that too.

He descends from the stairs with carefully measured steps, holding himself under the lights positioned to gleam against the soft shine of his hair and the glittering shard in his ear.

Dressed in layers of carefully selected clothing, from the swirling night-blue patterns on his _furisode_ and the inky black of his intricately knotted _obi_ , both made of material with a deep rippling sheen ( impervious to bladed weapons as he has learned ), to the silver-sharpness of his hairpin, Yomi is perfectly presented.

He makes his greetings and accepts well-wishes, makes the rounds to chat with guests he has invited — friends of his late parents and blood relatives both — with the manners of a polished and consummate host. As if he'd been doing this his whole life. Many sigh at the luck Uchiha Arisa and Uchiha Kazuki must have had, to have such a competent child carry on their legacy even if they were not there to see it.

How they must have trained him in his youth, to move so gracefully, to offer tea and refreshments with deep respectfulness, to use the money he inherited in such an organized fashion. So young, they sigh and smile at this hard-working child. Envy rises in a green tide that buzzes behinds Yomi's teeth and coats his tongue in acid.

He takes a small, polite bite of a senbei cracker behind the cover of his sleeves and follows it up with a sip of high-quality green tea to wash down the taste. A half-smile curls his lips where no one can see. Everything is working out as planned.

Now all he needs is someone to ask him about the Academy and this birthday will end perfectly. His target stands in the deep shadows behind an unoccupied couch, right beside one of the houseplants. Yomi finishes his cookie and goes to find him.

.

.

.

Uchiha Yachiru looks at this child and the deep-dark of his eyes, and realizes all of a sudden that they are not the black he thought they were. Instead, they are a shade of monstrous blue that matches perfectly with his outfit. He thinks of a looming abyss, one starved enough to devour the night sky and all of its stars, leaving only blankness behind. Blankness and a nightmare swathed in silk. Uchiha Yachiru truly considers running away but before he can, the child speaks.

"Excuse me uncle," he pipes up, voice silvery and melodic. "Are you a ninja?"

" _No_ ," he spits out frantically and makes a run for it.

.

.

.

Yomi joins the Academy on a beautiful Tuesday morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pray for the extremely perceptive and deeply regretting it uchiha yachiru!


End file.
